CHOOSING LIFE OF SERVICE OVER COMFORT

A year ago, Samantha Webb was working for a law firm in Washington, D.C., supporting the efforts of lobbyists who worked on behalf of health care groups. Pretty, successful and ambitious, she was only 23 with a solid career path ahead and seemingly nothing to prevent her from following it. She had a job she believed in, a social life she enjoyed, enough money to begin thinking about buying a little place of her own.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, she gave it all up.

On Memorial Day 2013, she’ll be somewhere in the Pacific, either at sea or ashore at one of several island nations where the USS Pearl Harbor is scheduled to pull into port, an enlisted sailor in the United States Navy. She’ll be away from family and friends. But she’ll be living her dream to serve, working as part of Pacific Partnership, one of the Navy’s largest maritime security and humanitarian missions in the world.

In 2009, Webb graduated from the University of Tampa in three years with a major in government and world affairs. She just wanted to try to effect change, and after two internships on congressional staffs, she thought Washington was the place she could do it.

She did, too. One of her co-workers remembers Webb pushing office leadership to consider targeting clients who sought to improve nutrition for Americans facing a growing obesity crisis.

But it wasn’t enough. She felt she could offer more to the world in places like Ethiopia, which she’d visited after college, than she could in an office. So she began researching the Navy. With her background, she looked into programs in public affairs, where she believed she could use her degree and experience to help tell the military’s story.

“Pacific Partnership, and missions like it,” read a news release she helped write before setting sail, “is a clear demonstration of the U.S. Navy’s commitment to enhanced regional security and long-term stability throughout the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.”

How readers respond to that statement probably depends on their political leanings, but what matters to me is the sentiment.

Samantha Webb embodies the best parts of our military, and of Memorial Day. She is the type of American I envy. She is also my wife.

I’m in the Navy, but stationed stateside. On Memorial Day, I will wake up in a comfortable bed in an apartment building that overlooks San Diego Bay. I have the day off. Sam will wake up in her cramped cot and begin the task of telling the stories of hundreds like her who are away from husbands and wives and children on the day service members most deserve to be with their families.

This is what Memorial Day means to me: It means that on May 14 I had to watch my wife cry from the rails of the Pearl Harbor as the ship pulled away from shore.

It means that the next day, an email appeared in my inbox.

“Remember,” Sam wrote, “that I went to do important work, and if I could do it and be with you I would. But, right now I just can’t.”

Under normal circumstances, I would give almost anything to celebrate Memorial Day with her. But the reason I can’t is the very reason I married her. This year, I wouldn’t change anything.